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“The entire situation reeks like a cheap TV movie,” states an opportunistic commentator during the chilling follow-up Influencers. At that point, he’s being manipulatively dismissive of a guest with an outlandish story he once claimed he believed. Yet his assessment of the events in the movie isn’t wrong. On its face, two films on demand chronicling a woman who insinuates herself into the lives of online influencers and then murders them seems like a modern-day version of a tawdry but cable-ready weekly TV movie. The surprising aspect about Influencers remains just how superior it is than plenty of its competition, regardless of where you watch it. It is precisely the suspense film that should give other movies a serious bout of FOMO.

Recapping the Original and Setting the Stage

2022’s Influencer tracks the mysterious CW (Cassandra Naud) as she quietly chooses solo-traveling social media targets, lures them to their deaths, and covers up those murders (at least temporarily) by seizing control of their online accounts. The movie concludes (spoiler ahead) with CW marooned on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, after her most recent mark, Madison (Emily Tennant), reverses their roles on her.

This lends 2025's Influencers a degree of ambiguity, as returning writer-director the director picks up with the character CW contentedly residing alongside her partner Diane (Lisa Delamar) in Paris. During a trip to celebrate the couple’s first anniversary, British influencer Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) catches CW's attention and ire.

CW remarks to her partner that someone should try stranding a device-obsessed online personality in a place without any devices and see if they can survive. Are we witnessing an origin-story prequel? Was CW radicalized by seeing the special treatment given to a single clout-chaser?

Shifting Perspectives and International Chases

The story’s perspective changes multiple times, eventually clarifying those early scenes’ place in the timeline. Harder catches up with Madison, now cleared of carrying out CW's offenses, yet still encounters suspicion over her version of what happened, which includes the murder of Madison’s boyfriend. The film also follows Jacob (Jonathan Whitesell), based in Bali and trying to juice his career as half of a conservative-influencer power couple with Ariana (Veronica Long), though his chosen platform is bro-heavy streams, as opposed to the curated images that typically capture CW's interest.

Naud remains terrifically magnetic in the part, a role that appears particularly tailor-made for her talents. (She even created CW's striking outfits.) Although the follow-up's focus leans heavily into CW — the original felt more equally divided between the two women — it still functions as a story of rival amateur detectives, as Madison and CW employ fake accounts, Insta-stalking, and an apparently unlimited travel budget to chase and/or escape each other. Of course, perhaps the unlimited budget aren't needed. Online personalities possess a talent for gaining access to luxurious locales without paying much, a skill that CW echoes through her more blatant scheming.

Resourceful Production and Cinematic Travelogue

The creative team for Influencers appear equally ingenious in locating stunning locations to visit, although they were presumably more legitimate in their methods. The vast majority of the movie appears to be shot on location, providing it an authentic gravity that remains even when many scenes involve a handful of actors of characters looking at computer or phone screens.

It’s the same principle that made the Bond franchise appear so consistently opulent over the years: Indeed, explosive action and visual effects can show off a big budget, however simply offering a travelogue of sorts for the audience also feels inherently cinematic. This is especially fitting for a narrative so rooted in the simultaneous superficial glamour and desperate hustle of creating envy-inducing online content.

Every character visiting Bali, similar to those who were in Thailand in the original, appear to enjoy entry to impossibly chic modern bungalows; there are movies concerning beach rescuers which don't feature this much overhead swimming-pool video. These individuals must believably inhabit these lush, remote places to highlight the uneasy irony of how frequently each person — even the woman exacting revenge on the influencers’ narcissistic falseness — nonetheless spends plenty of time in the glow of their devices.

Balanced Depictions and Tech-Savvy Tension

Simultaneously, Harder hasn’t authored a screed targeting the emptiness of online fame. Though it can be gratifying to see CW exploit various online personalities, and a sense reminiscent of Hitchcock of identification allows us to wish she evades capture, Harder is relatively understanding of the key influencer figures. Previously, he keyed into the loneliness Madison felt during supposedly envy-worthy vacations. Here, the director appears confident that just observing Jacob at work will make it clear that he’s peddling snake-oil masculinity to other doofuses; he avoids turning into a caricature the character further. He even grants Jacob a measure of dignity through depicting his genuine loyalty to his partner; he is two-faced, yet Ariana is a partner in his double standards, not someone exploited by it.

The other side of this balanced approach is that it may occasionally seem that he’s nodding at elements of contemporary digital culture without investigating them. This is especially true of the way he introduces artificial intelligence into the plot, an intriguing development which misses the psychosexual kick it should have. The retitled sequel for the film could offer fans of the first movie hope for a larger-scale ante-upping, and the film does eventually provide exactly that, with an appropriately wild final act. But before that, it resembles more a polished Hitchcock thriller than a wild-eyed, tech-addled De Palma-style shocker. Influencers’ heavy use of actual places might also be what keeps it from coming across like pure nightmare fuel. The world might be saturated with content-churning influencers, online fraud, and exploitative travel, but the world itself remains present, at least for now.